A Reminder From E.B.
There have been numerous complaints received regarding the services provided under the current regime and we would like to take the time to respond to these complaints and to help those of you in the outlying areas understand the true situation.
It has been noted that several individuals purporting to be the “Easter Bunny” do not seem to be authentic. Of course they’re not authentic. We don’t do personal appearances or take requests. As the anthropomorphic personification of a blended holiday we are entirely too involved in attempting to fulfill the unreasoned expectations of various groups. Besides which, we noticed that many of the requests came from people with French surnames, and I don’t think it is necessary to remind people what happens to rabbits in France: in Britain bunnies are found in children books; in France in cookbooks. [See also North Korea.]
We had what we thought was an excellent solution, but then discovered that due to his existence as a pookah, Harvey was not visible to major segments of the population and, to be honest, he had a problem staying away from the tipple for any major block of time.
As for the quality of the costumes, we are certainly not going to recommend anyone “donate” their pelt so these obvious frauds can have “genuine rabbit fur” costumes.
There have been other complaints following the change from solid to hollow chocolate statuary. The Chocolate Cartel has been jacking up prices for years, and while we agree that problems like the disruptions in the Ivory Coast have had a negative impact on the pricing of the raw materials, we suspect the price increases have more to do with avarice than insurrections or an active hurricane season.
We had to choose between offering smaller, solid figures, or larger, hollow figures. Research showed us that the target audience, small children, only actually ate the ears and nibbled a bit from the toes. The majority of the figures were consumed by parents claiming: “to prevent the kids from getting sick from all that candy.” Our thinking was the kids would be impressed with the initial size of the figures, and the parents needed to lose weight anyway.
Hollowing the figures took more time and you have to keep in mind that the staff is already in pretty weird from the massive doses of sugar, gelatin, and dyes they have to ingest to produce jelly beans. Nonetheless, the illusion is preserved.
Regarding the “grass” and “baskets”: hey, wake up and smell the polypropyl vinyl! The days of people having a basket out back and grass around the house are gone. We ask for baskets and find the concept apparently doesn’t translate well as the suppliers move further to the East. But the grass? Grass is grass all over the world. It’s green, it is almost always the definition of green in every language. So we ask for grass and we get shredded plastic in almost every color except green. We know it’s wrong. We complain every year and every year we are told that this is “the new green”.
So, suck it up and get out there and deliver.
12 comments
Fun post. I guess tomorrow is Easter. I haven’t made it to the store to get my favorite candy. Those little chocolate eggs in the purpleish package. Darn! I need to see if there are any left.
If you wait until Monday there will be plenty left and they’ll be half price. I don’t keep chocolate in the house, as the cats might get into it and it isn’t good for pets.
That Shakesville “rabbit” is one evil-looking motherfucker. The bunny over to my place is friendlier than THAT. This one looks like Charlie Manson’s inside of it.
The line-up is cute. Although the duck looks distinctly stoned. Lucky bastid.
The bunny looks nauseous from eating too many marshmallow eggs.
The local ether bunny here brought me 2 pints of Ponchatoula strawberries, so I’m happy.
Or should I say, “hoppy”?
Nope, too cheesy.
We get lots of bunnies here – eating folks gardens. But so far no real *rodents of the trees* – them pesky squirrels which are much nastier and cause more trouble than the cotton-tails. Our trees are too small to support their arboreal life style yet. 🙂
I can’t imagine anyone allowing their child to sit on the lap of the Shakesville Bunny. I would arrest him on general principles.
Appreciate those strawberries, Annti, they are a real PIA to grow properly. Weeding and pinching off runners is a lot of backbreaking work. My Dad and his mother grew them, and I worked them as a child. It’s a lot of hand work to produce them.
We don’t have rabbits this close to the Gulf, Karen, but the pines, oaks, and pecans support a lot of “tree rats.” As people clear out the big trees for more grass, they get pushed to my block where there are still large trees.
On the “grass” problem: I have encountered edible Easter basket grass. Nasty stuff. 😛
I had to stop doing an Easter basket because my Koshka thought it was all edible. It would come out in the end, as they say, but not a nice surprise in the litter box.
I don’t want to know about anything that is supposed to be consumed – the rye grass that you grow for inside cats is good enough.
You have furballs to play with on Easter. Ringo is still putting off the inevitable and getting cranky because she can’t jump or get to some of her spots because of the football she swallowed.
Jessica had a thing for mylar Christmas tree icicles, which made for very festive hairballs. So far Kaylee hasn’t found a need for plastic in her diet.
I was wondering if Ringo had been playing around while she was out. Goes without saying, I guess. What is it about female cats and sports equipment, anyway?
Watch out for semi-seasonal bronchitis, cat lovers. My Boy cat is getting over a hellacious case right now (amoxicillin in the pale-blue tablets), and what originally appeared to be seasonal allergies (which he’s never had before) turned into fever, full-body aches & cramps, and basically turned a very healthy, very active, very spoiled 22-pound cat into a huge black RUG. Didn’t hardly move for almost a week.
But now that he’s beating it, he’s right back to being goofy, bouncy, and pouncing on my feet like the shoes are some deadly prey which MUST BE KILLED!!! Miss Biddy has a bit of a sinus problem, but no fevers or aches yet, aside from her usual arthritis (they’re 9.5 years old), but I’ve ordered cod-liver oil & glucosamine/chondroitin drops to start as soon as he finishes his amoxi round. These damned cats get better healthcare than I do!
Of course, since Boy is such the slut, all of the girls at the vet’s office just LOOOOVE him, the gigantic (big as a Maine Coon) furball sloth that he can be. Biddy, on the other hand, prefers to keep them at arm’s reach, and if they can’t understand that, well, then the hell with ’em, she’d rather get back into the carrier. Not a “people person,” that girl.
And yes, Bryan, I know all about picking strawberries as a child in Livingston Parish — not commercially, and certainly not with the same crop yields as Ponchatoula or Albany or Tickfaw, but for an old neighbor who planted two acres of berries a year, I did an assload of berry-pickin’ in my day. When you’re a kid, it’s so much easier to get down there on the knees and do that kind of back-breaking work. And since it wasn’t a “real” job, we got paid in however many strawberries we could eat before they got to the basket. Kinda like picking blackberries in July, fighting off wasps, rattlesnakes, and Florida lizards — if you made it home without purple fingers, purple lips, and a sugar-high sigh, you just weren’t paying attention or you had too much sunstroke to be hungry. I still crave blackberries every year, but up here, you gotta SEARCH for a still-living blackberry bramble — most of ’em around here have been landscaped to death by the invading hordes of yuppie scum. Wheeee!
P.S.: I was right proud to get two pints of Ponchatoula berries for myself, to be truthful. If I could only eat one kind of food for the rest of my life, that’d be it. Almost tied with fried chicken, but yup, the berries would win. Any strawberry that’s so strong and fresh that the smell of ’em whacks you in the face as you step through the grocery store/produce stand DOOR — it’s a magical thing, son.
There’s just something in that deep, rich black delta soil in Tangipahoa parish that creates the best berries on the planet. Maybe it’s the Louisiana propensity for producing high-grade bullshit, maybe it’s the runoff from that contaminated river into the ground water, whatever it is, it WORKS!
Better than twice as many chocolate eggs, bunnies, even Heavenly Hash eggs.
Better up than down, Anya. Yes, it wasn’t the long absence, the timing says in happened February. It doesn’t take long.
Annti, they’re great to eat, but my grandmother ran her berry patch as a commercial enterprise and my Dad put in 5 acres, so it wasn’t much fun. That river soil should grow almost everything as it’s bringing the topsoil down from the whole country.
Upper Respiratory Infection is the number one cause of death among kittens locally. I keep a supply of the pink liquid version on hand to give them if I can catch them when they get sick. Too often they just go off to be alone and it’s too late when I find them. I do what I can, but I don’t want to terrorize them.
We have dewberry vines, which is a type of blackberry, all over growing wild. It’s the advantage of having a brush pile in the back.
Dewberries are nice, but I prefer the stronger, tarter flavor of the blackberries. And yes, it’s worth the pickers, the thorns, the brambles, the wasps, the snakes, and the sunburn. And I’ve tried canned, frozen, and otherwise preserved, as well as grocery-store fresh blackberries, and nothing compares to the real thing.
Thus far, the ferals that I feed & neuter here at L’Hotel du Fucktards have been really healthy. When I had Smudge & Tommie (boy & girl kittens who were about 7 wks when I trapped them & had ’em fixed) here to recover overnight, Tommie did fine (and ripped me seven ways to hell and back with those talons & teeth), but Smudge didn’t come out of the anaesthesia very well, and despite the fact that I kept neosporin on his little scrotum (“too small” to suture, they tell me) wounds, he got a hellacious infection. Little bit of congestion, mostly just feeling like he’d been run over by a truck, lethargic, just pitiful. A good round of the pink amoxi for a week, lots of love & snuggles and frequent baths to keep his bo-bo’s clean, and his favorite nectar o’the gawds, condensed/sweetened milk — and he was up & about, like it had never happened. I still miss the little shit. He will let me pet him a little bit when I feed them, but never too much, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to be snuggled anymore. I cried like a baby when I turned him loose, ’cause he hauled ass and never looked back. It’s so weird, how they can go from sweet, affectionate (purring, grooming, kissing) little cuddle-babies one minute, to right back to their feral nature and gone like a shot. And yup, I’ve held onto that amoxi, just in case. If I’d been able to diagnose Boy’s bronchitis on my own, I’d have used it on him, but it took the doctor to make sure.
That shit is feeling SO much better today, he stowed-away in The Dick’s work car today (first day on a new job as a surveyor for the hwy dept) and managed to escape the car down at the parish courthouse, and then The Dick & his new co-worker had to play Kitty-Cat Rodeo Round-Up all over the courthouse lawn & down into a (9-foot drop!) holler behind the courthouse complex. It’s amazing how an arthritic, overweight, recently-at-death’s-door cat can suddenly turn into Steve McQueen when he wants to…